The world according to David Mamet is a con game, full of hustlers and their rubes-in-waiting. It’s a tenet that has informed his best work, and casts the bitterly uplifting Redbelt as a promising departure from the canon. Is it performance-driven action, or an action-fueled drama? For the most part, it succeeds as both.

Chiwetel Ejiofor is Mike Terry, a virtuous Jujitsu instructor who’s charitably running his West LA academy into debt. When a freak accident with a fragile stranger (Emily Mortimer) destroys his storefront window, Mike plunges into bankruptcy. His humiliating search for a loan becomes a maddening cycle of betrayal and misfortune.

As a visual stylist, Mamet is finally impressing. In the age of Bourne, he’s a little outclassed, but the explosions of violence are confidently authentic. They’re more about tension than thrills, a constant challenge to Mike’s training mantra “there’s always an escape.” When money’s involved, the escape is rarely a peaceful one.

There’s nothing quotable here, Mamet’s eye is more engaged than his voice this time around, but his signature rhythms bob and weave throughout, chewing up and spitting out the unequipped. Rodrigo Santoro is a cringing casualty, Tim Allen is shockingly great (among legends of delivery, he’s the film’s mvp), and Joe Mantegna’s scathing cameo as a big shot producer stands out in a movie crowded with villains. New Mamet and Old Mamet are at war over the women here, with Emily Mortimer performing skittish magic as a damaged lawyer and Alice Braga as a one-note nag of a wife.

The revelation is Ejiofor, as calm and mysteriously age-less as a master warrior should be. When the reversals and off-camera twists turn the plot into mud, he more or less is the climax. It doesn’t really matter why Mike decides to fight, or who he fights, it’s seeing him finally on the attack that’s momentous, and all the hustlers can do is watch.

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